January 9, 2017

There’s a story about two hunters sleeping in their tent when a hungry lion attacks. One starts to lace up his shoes and the other says, “You’re crazy. You can’t outrun a lion.” The other looks at him and calmly replies, “I only have to outrun you.” Replacing marketers with artificial intelligence is like that: AI doesn’t have be the best marketer possible but just better than the marketers it replaces. For small businesses, where marketing is often done poorly or not at all, the human competition is pretty weak. Marketing automation vendor Signpost, which serves over 7,000 small business clients, has taken up this challenge with a new offering that uses AI to analyze customer behaviors, find campaign opportunities, select suitable lists, create a draft email or text message, and present it to the client to edit or send with one click of a button. Part of Signal’s service is to collect email, phone, and purchase information about customers. It aggregates this data across clients to help its AI system understand behaviors and find campaign opportunities.

Listrak is another B2C marketing automation system that mostly does email for retailers. But its clients are mid-size businesses where the marketers are less likely to need or want a robot to build campaigns for them. Listrak is instead expanding to Facebook and Google advertising. Specifically, its new “audience automation platform” lets marketers automatically load leads captured in Facebook into Listrak and use Listrak lists as audiences for Facebook and Google AdWords campaigns. Nothing revolutionary here but it does eliminate some drudgery.

We might as well finish out the day with still more news about B2C marketing automation. Bridg assembles unified customer data from Point of Sale, loyalty, and other systems at retailers and restaurants. It then applies predictive models to classify customers based on their behaviors, assigns customers to appropriate (human-created) campaigns, and creates highly personalized messages. Like Listrak, Bridg is expanding beyond email and SMS to deliver messages in display, mobile, and social channels.

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